Hannan has an exuberant gift for rhetoric, and lines up a delightfully off-beat collection of Glasgwegian characters, led by the engagingly indecisive Alison Peebles, caught on her wedding day between two guys called Billy and a loquacious scrounger. Shirley Henderson is dangerously leery as the pent-up daughter, and Brian Pettifer hilariously down-to-earth as the harassed clergyman who recognises that for this bunch, 10 commandments are way too many: "pick one and try and stick to it".It was an incongruous sight, seeing the courtroom for the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague sited next to the subway exit for Broadway and West 42nd Street. For the National's platform performances of Tricycle's production of Srebrenica took place on the Olivier in front of the set for Guys and Dolls. In Nicolas Kent's eye-opening production - which ought to tour the whole of the UK - the roles of the witnesses and lawyers were superbly understated, conveying the horrific through the humdrum - as the cast paused to check facts in notebooks or to ensure the headphones were working.
The testimony of the Croat (Jay Simpson) who shot Bosnian Muslims for the Bosnian Serbs was unforgettable: he would simply have been shot, he says, if he hadn't shot the others, and even then it wouldn't have made any difference.In the discussion afterwards the panel (which included Martin Bell and Paddy Ashdown) had been promised an "ambient" microphone It wasn't on and half the audience couldn't hear. As one panellist after another made the point of how hard it had been to get across the message of what was happening in Bosnia, the sound technicians at the National unwittingly dramatised their point.'Caravan': Bush, W12 (0181 743 3388), to 13 Dec 'Sive': Watford Palace (01923 225671), to Sat. 'The Man with Green Hair'": Bristol Old Vic (0117 987 7877), to Sat 'Shining Souls': Old Vic, SE1 (0171 928 7616), to 1 Dec 'Srebrenica': Belfast Festival (01232 665577), Mon-Fri.. Sometimes obliquely byzantine but sometimes blindingly direct, the new book of essays by composer-academic Alexander Goehr (Finding the Key, Faber pounds 11.99) is the most engaging bedside book of musicology I've read for ages. And in one essay - a memoir of the so-called Manchester School in the 1950s - there's a sharp vignette of an encounter with the youthful Peter Maxwell Davies "You compose?" asks Goehr politely "Only when I want to," snaps the scourge of smalltalk. Half a century on, Sir Peter clearly "wants to" all the time: his productivity is fierce, relentless, and not always destined for immortal life. But the word is good on his new oratorio Job, which gets its UK premiere next weekend at the Barbican.
And last Tuesday saw the successful London premiere of his new Piano Concerto which had been unveiled a few nights earlier in Nottingham, and with the same forces: Kathryn Stott, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and Maxwell Davies to conduct. Over all this massive output, Davies hasn't fought shy of traditional forms. And yet, oddly, there has never until now been a piano concerto. It's odd, too, that when he finally produces one, it's a specific response to the playing of Kathryn Stott, who isn't closely involved with new music Her territory is late-Romantic, and above all, Faure. But she's also versatile and resourceful, with a tough streak in her lyricism and an appetite for lots of notes - which Davies gives her in abundance here.